After a full week of a mostly-Soylent diet, I wanted to report on how I’ve been feeling and my overall health. I’ll start by saying that I have designated one day a week (on professional advice) to return to normal food; that day is Friday, as it’s a social outing night for me. I also did not stick to a 3 Soylents a day the entire week or weekend, but I did make sure that I had at least one or two Soylent meals on those days. In short, my log kind of looks like this:

On each day, I make sure to consume at least 72 ounces of water. Usually 24 ounces after every Soylent meal or with a regular meal.

Exercise Notes: I had gone to the gym late Sunday night, and I was feeling very sore on Monday. Decided to skip until Wednesday to give my muscles a change to repair. I stuck to cardio-only that night and returned to weights on Thursday night (I went a little lighter this time).

As a result of the exercise on Wednesday night, however, I noticed a problem. I was starving after my workout, and this was three hours after my dinner Soylent. Given that I burned 900 calories during my hour-long workout, I decided to have a snack. I ended up staying awake until 1:30am as I ate at 11pm. Even with the snack, I was still well under my net caloric intake for the day.

The following night when I added my weight training back in, I didn’t feel as bad as I did with the extra protein in my diet from the night before and I didn’t feel hungry after the workout.

On Friday morning, I had my annual physical scheduled. I spoke with my doctor about the change in my diet, and she had never heard of Soylent before. I sent her all the proper literature, including the breakdown of nutrients and what’s used to get those nutrients. She was encouraged by this shift, but was worried about my electrolytic count. She ordered a full blood lab for (she was going to do this for the physical anyway). She asked for weekly updates on weight and BP, and I would return in about a month for another blood draw using this one as a baseline.

Over the weekend, I got my blood labs back (this was on four days of Soylent, so far):

Weight/BMI: 337 lbs / 49.74

Blood Pressure: 131/82

Pulse: 80

Glucose: Down 15% (Great, because I was worried about pre-Diabetic conditions)

A1C: Down a little, but within the normal range.

Sodium: Up 20%, but within the normal range.

Cholesterol: No change (below 240)

HDL: No change (normal)

LDL: No change (normal)

After I was sent all this information over the weekend, I got an email from her saying she was happy with the labs, and to send the update on Friday morning. She recommended that I increase my exercising a bit more.

This morning, I weighed myself and I came in at 331 lbs. I’m really hoping this is water-weight since I’ve reduced by weekly sodium intake by quite a bit, otherwise I’m worried that I’m dropping weight way too quickly for a weekend.

Recipes

In my last post, I talked about recipes due to the complete lack of flavor that Soylent has. Again, the Soylent community has been instrumental in trying some of the different things you can do with it. I’ve done two of the recipes so far, and I had to modify one of them at the request of my doctor. Earlier, I mentioned the “choco-banana” Soylent that I modified by using Nestle’s NesQuik as a substitute for chocolate syrup. When I talked with my doctor, she recommended trying a non-sugary alternative as the NesQuik introduced about 12 gram of sugar per meal. My wife mentioned using cocoa powder instead, so now my recipe has changed to:

1 scoop Soylent

2 scoops water

1.5 teaspoons of the Oil Blend

1 large banana

1 tablespoon Cocoa powder

2 packets of Splenda

6 ice cubes

I took some shots of it coming together, but I shot these when I was still using Nesquik; the concept is the same. I also tried a another one, this time involving pears:

1 scoop Soylent

2 scoops water

1.5 teaspoons of the Oil Blend

3 pear halves

1 dash of cinnamon

6 ice cubes

Unfortunately, this did not turn out as well as I’d hoped. The Soylent nothingness kind of overwhelmed the pear and cinnamon, which is pretty incredible considering how potent cinnamon can be. I ended up going back to the choco-banana recipe instead.

As pictured, this is the basic package of Soylent with the oil additive (containing your Omega-3 and Omega-6), scoop, and release notes/instruction manual. According to the Soylent manual, you’re supposed to ramp up the number of meals you replace over the course of five days. On the first day, you replace one meal, then you replace two, and finally you replace all three meals. Each replacement accounts for one-third the total amount of vitamins you’re supposed to intake per day according to the recommended allowances as determined by the FDA. (more…)

I’d been reading about a new meal replacement system that attempts to replace the need for hunting and gathering by reducing the core components of what you need to survive into a powder form. One of the writers at Ars Technica also wrote about his experiences with this product, named Soylent. According to the advertising and the daily journal, all you needed to do was add water and some pre-packaged oil and you have a liquid meal ready-to-eat. I went to their website back in July of 2014 and decided that I would try it for a week to see if I could stomach it (pun intended, sorry).

I visited their site to place an order and I didn’t realize how backed up their shipments were. It looked like that for the $70 I paid out, I might not receive my first shipment until late September. That’s no trouble, really. After all, it wasn’t as though I were dying of hunger. I just pushed off my plans until September.

And then September arrived and still no Soylent. I received an email saying that they were tremendously backed up and that shipments were being sent out to current subscribers to their product. New subscribers (myself) would get lower priority. Made sense to me; after all, if you’re already on the plan, then you would need to have priority over people who aren’t. This required me to have some more patience, though, as they projected another 10-12 weeks (4 months) before I would see my first bag of food-powder.

In between then, I flew to the United Kingdom on a work assignment and returned in late December to find my first shipment of Soylent waiting for me.

Therefore, I begin this project with this shipment and hope to report on what it is doing to me over time. To properly introduce my vitals, I am rather obese (330 lbs) for my height (5 feet, 9 inches). I’m not looking for this to be a silver bullet, but I am interested in simplifying a way to eat healthy in order to maximize the exercise program I’m going through. For reference, I am switching off cardio and weight-lifting every other day with the following routine: